Thursday, January 17, 2008

Tanz des Todes

I met my end at a gun barrel's. It introduced me to my maker, but the next day I awoke, live as a bird.

A man I didn't recognize did it to me, and I wonder who he was. He was someone, maybe he was me, and maybe he was right to try and kill me. What is a dream suicide? An alter-ego murdering the other, not really suicide at all.

Med-induced madness, I had also seen a bus crash due to an explosion in the city, in Seattle's own U-district.

This is all ages ago, but a week of violent dreams will shake anyone, even me in my then-insecure anxiety-ridden existence. Probably I just pretended not to shake, that was the way of life in those days. Hold the whole of it in till it breaks, don't show a sign of weakness till my will breaks.

It was because of meds. Side effects are the devils best friend, because it must be enjoyable to watch the shifting of the scales of suffering. One symptom down, the other up; it's a see-saw of sickness.

But why a medication that affects blood pressure should induce nightmares is utterly beyond me.

This dream was the closest thing I've had to a nightmare, and it was hardly the wake-up-sweating-shaking sort of experience that I've seen on screens. Those are performances anyway, but some people must do that in dreams.

It was years ago so it's sliding out of consciousness. Funny how some dreams stick like real memories, while others vanish into the space between waking and sleeping--in the blink of an eye.

Considering only the vivid things I can remember, my life consists of: dinosaurs, insects, flying around my hometown, a lightning storm, a crowd of high school kids almost as awkward as Iwas, rowing across a raging windy lake at noon, being shot and exploded, then some craziness about Physics and Europe and then a quick death behind a desk. In a cube.

Cubicles: the new mausoleums. You know you're dead already when you wind up in one of those, for our species as it should be died ancient ages ago.

Yet was never truly born--we are a miscarriage. I think we're in the throes of dying, a post-natal abortion of evolution. Watch us rise and rise and rise, not to a peak but to a breaking point.

A creature designed for small scales has exceeded its limits.

Maybe that's what my alter ego knew, that it had to end.

We couldn't keep going upward forever, so it had to be culled like a herd's sick and weak. He's more enlightened then I, perhaps, because he is a pragmatic predator, he knows what must be done and has no qualms about doing it.

Or perhaps he's just vicious and lacking in humanity; assuming I'm the human half. Like a sci-fi bizarro universe, we naively assume we're the good ones.

So much like this aspect of me, perhaps what is needed is some real change in this world: what we've seen for some time now is business as usual, but with fewer constraints. We're free of death much more than before, we've slipped one hand out of the manacles.

Is something trying to stop us? Mother earth, or maybe the consequences of our actions or still some other extraneous force? Something internal?

I hope if some aspect of us has the wisdom of my murdering alter-ego, it is more successful than he.

I've heard nothing from him in years now, and I expect he made the only move he could. We danced the waltz of self-destruction, and I dance on out of it before it became a fatal tango del muerto. Tanz des Todes.

I lived through his attempt on our lives, in my delusion his shots ineffective, for I knew I could not die. If homo sapiens survives himself, may all who encounter us be so lucky.